Extending The Season

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Both cloches and cold frames are useful for all seasons of the gardening year. Hardy vegetables planted in the shelters in mid fall may yield abundant, super-early spring produce. Later in the spring, the plant houses can be used to harden of vegetable seedlings and start cuttings of herbs or ornamentals. If you replace the panes or plastic with a gardener's shade cloth, you've got a place to raise summer lettuce. And you can set a cloche or portable cold frame in the garden itself to overwinter half-hardy perennials . . . to dry and warm a section of the garden you want to plant in early spring . . . or to shield some tender transplants you want to gently heel in. (In this last case, try draping a white bed sheet over the frame or cloche for a day or two to moderate both light and heat.)

So why wait? Start this fall with one tunnel cloche or cold frame, and try your own seasonextending garden experiments. If all goes well, while your friends are picking their way through seed catalogs and dreaming of spring, you'll be picking your way through the crops of your own wintertime harvest!

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print